The Basic Approaches
There are three ways in which a company can work with Cree to procure LEDs to achieve color-consistent lighting products.
1. Buy one or a very small number of bins. The purchase of the same small collection of parts over and over is a reasonable and
repeatable strategy, but due to nature of LED manufacturing, this is never the lowest cost way to procure a production supply of LEDs.
2. With the release of EasyWhite products, beginning in late 2009, Cree has made it possible for its customers to work with LEDs in a
way that is similar to original bulb-specification practices, e.g., specifying just CCT and flux. Cree performs color mixing on behalf of
its customers in building EasyWhite versions of select XLamp LED components.
3. The most cost-effective way to work with Cree is to buy full distributions of XLamp LEDs, i.e., the full manufacturing output of an LED
production run, which includes variety in flux and chromaticity. To use full distributions effectively, the lighting manufacturer develops
expertise in multi‑LED illumination systems and color‑mixing recipes. Color‑mixing recipes offer numerous flexible solutions to create
repeatable chromaticity results and can deliver a cost-competitive advantage over the first two approaches.
These approaches are illustrated graphically in the following sequence of illustrations